Every year in September, just as the leaves start turning entrancing shades of gold and red, we start watching scary movies in our house. It’s just what you do. Clean up after supper, gather some blankets, snacks and beverages, then browse through DirecTV, Netflix, Prime, and Hulu, and if all else fails, resort to our bluray collection to find a scary movie to watch.

We love the classics–Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream–but honestly, who hasn’t seen them a million freakin’ times, right?

Patrick Elliott is a troubled driver for an Uber-style rideshare service. After a moment of inattention leads to a violent traffic accident, Patrick flees the scene, leaving a motorcyclist dead on the side of the road, but soon, he finds himself haunted from beyond, and hunted by the law.

The last installment of this serial, a year and a half ago, was intended to be my last. Living in a haunted house is something we’ve come to accept since the presence here has never really felt malevolent or menacing. That’s not to say nothing has happened in the last few years–plenty of things have. After awhile, though, it starts to feel almost commonplace, and you stop paying so much attention.

The events I’ve written about in this serial took place over the course of about two years, from summer of 2007 to spring of 2009. As I said in my last post, I don’t have a Hollywood ending for this story. I’ll tell you what other people have said, what we think, and where we are now, and you can decide.

FM Paranormal came to the conclusion that my house has residual hauntings, which is like a playback of a previous event, a release of stored energy, and also intelligent spirit hauntings.

A nationally known psychic medium from Minneapolis told me the encounters might have been centered around the hallway and bathroom area because it’s a vortex. That’s where the elements come together. Earth, air, water, you know.

A caller to my radio show in 2008 said the black shapes my son saw in the house are shadow people. Author Heidi Hollis wrote a book on the subject of shadow people, described as “dark silhouettes with human shapes and profiles that flicker in and out of peripheral vision.” Some of the people she interviewed for her book reported the figures had attempted to “jump on their chest and choke them.” Exactly what shadow people are is open to debate, just like everything else in this supernatural arena. Some say ghosts, some say inter-dimensional travelers, and still others insist shadow people are demonic or otherwise evil entities.

I don’t know what more to say about these theories, except to say that I’m glad I don’t have to think about it too much anymore, because things are much better today than they were in 2009. In the two years that these things were happening, my wife and I were at all-time lows, personally and professionally, and we had a whole series of serious personal challenges, one after another; some unlucky and some just self-destructive. It almost destroyed our family, physically and economically. For reasons I’m still not clear about, our activity almost entirely disappeared for about a year around this time. Since that time, as we’ve continued to find our way back, the activity has been mercifully tame.

With the clarity that comes from years spent wondering and replaying events in my head, this is what I think.

The gray shape that looked over my shoulder while I was examining the abstract for my house has become a familiar sight to me over the years (to my wife too, but I won’t speak for her) and I’ve dubbed her the “Gray Lady.” In truth, she is a featureless humanoid shape, and I can’t tell you a lot about her, except that she’s always ready to startle you when you pass a doorway. I’ll have an armload of laundry, walk by the bedroom door, and she’ll be standing in there, just in the perfect spot for me to catch a glimpse of her as I walk by. She also likes to peek around stuff — the shower curtain or a doorjamb, for example, which is particularly creepy. I don’t know why I think it’s female, it’s just the impression I get. I still see her on a fairly regular basis and occasionally I hear her walking around on the floor, making the floorboards creak.

The little boy in blue that we saw on the day we moved in was around for awhile from 2007 to 2009 and was pretty scary for awhile. He was standing in my darkened bedroom one night with just his face protruding into the hallway, so when I walked by, I jumped like you wouldn’t believe. A face, three feet off the floor, staring at me from my bedroom door with what my friend Terry describes as “grudge eyes.” He had a habit of showing up when you least expect it and scaring the shit out of you, so it makes me happy to say I have not seen him in years.

I don’t know what they are so I’ll just call them things — these two things are the only manifestations we’ve seen on a repeated basis. Neither myself nor my wife have ever seen the black shapes my son reported six years ago, and he has never said anything about them since.

As for why my house might be haunted, I am similarly without answers. It was only built in 1950, which doesn’t strike me as particularly old for a haunted house. Does it have something to do with the fairgrounds that stood two blocks from here a century ago? Maybe. That could be why we captured some recordings that sounded like carousel music, I just can’t say for sure. Native people lived in this area going back to the end of Lake Agassiz seven millennia ago, plenty of time for the kind of tragedy that might result in a haunting of this spot on the prairie. Anything is possible, I suppose.

We still live in this house, which I think can be attributed to a number of things. First, the subsiding activity since 2009 has made it more tolerable to live here. Second, we’ve always viewed the occurrences with a skeptic’s eye, which makes it easier for my wife to simply chalk it up as “nothing” when she catches a glimpse of the gray lady in the living room, or to convince herself the cat is not staring intently at anything in that dark hallway behind her, he’s just being a cat. Finally, and most importantly, the reason I think we’re still here is because we’ve never really felt interacted with in a way that was meant to terrify us — the scares have been largely incidental and not particularly menacing.

We’ve learned to live with it in the last few years, even enjoy it at times. When something strange happens, the gray lady makes a convenient scapegoat.

I’ll end with the same words I used when I began:

In the course of my life, I’ve had a few run-ins I would characterize as supernatural or paranormal, but the experiences we would have when we bought our first home would leave no doubt in my mind about the reality of the supernatural. With Halloween not far off, I thought this story would be appropriate.

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My initial investigation of the strange happenings in my home was totally amateur, but I managed to come up with some evidence, including recordings of Electronic Voice Phenomena I mentioned in my last post. One bit of sound recorded under my son’s bed sounded like carousel music.

As I investigated the history of my home and my neighborhood, I discovered that my house is just two blocks from where the fairgrounds stood until 1967. As a matter of fact, the fairgrounds stood in this neighborhood for almost fifty years before my little house was even built.

Fargo Fairgrounds Grandstand, 1908

The whole area is re-developed now and home to Fargo North High School and some strip malls, but, as a kid who grew up smelling the smells and hearing the sounds of the North Dakota State Fair about six blocks from my house in Minot, I’m pretty sure this fairground in Fargo once filled the air of my neighborhood with carousel music accompanied by the laughter of children. What the connection would be to my house, I have no idea — it’s one hundred percent speculation, but it seemed like an uncanny coincidence.

I decided this was a job for the professionals, so in the spring of 2008, FM Paranormal staged an investigation of our home. Charles and Shawn from FM Paranormal assembled a crew of four and spent a night in our house. The investigation itself was fairly uneventful and, to my recollection, nothing out of the ordinary occurred. It was only upon examination of the recordings that the FM Paranormal guys uncovered apparent voices from beyond.

Charles and Shawn came to our studio one morning to announce their results. They were in the studio with us awaiting the end of a segment for about ten minutes before we went on the air, and we chatted for a bit over coffee. We opened our microphones to start our segment, and within one minute, our transmitter went off the air.

Listen to that, and the rest of the reveal below, broadcast on Y94 in Fargo when I was a morning host there. This recording includes all of the EVP (electronic voice phenomena) sounds captured in the house during their investigation. It’s about fourteen minutes long. Turn out the lights and turn up the volume.

For reference, the three members of this show are myself as the host, Megan, a talented Fargo announcer who has since moved on to another radio position, and Rat, also known as Terry Hinnenkamp, my co-author and photographer for the Ghosts of North Dakota series of coffee table books. He is still on this radio show today.

FM Paranormal’s verdict:“We believe there is enough evidence to call Troy’s house haunted. There seems to be both intelligent and residual hauntings here.” You can get the take, straight from FM Paranormal by visiting my case page at their website.

I find myself apologizing again because the video and photo evidence you hear them referencing in the audio above has been lost over the years due to a) poor filing on my part and b) the suspension of my old YouTube account (because radio deejays like to use popular music in their promotional videos) at a time when YouTube would just delete your entire account for copyright infringement. I really wish I still had the videos because they were compelling.

At any rate, I’m not trying to convince anyone, rather, attempting to tell this story in a straight-forward manner, as credibly as possible, in a way that leaves you entertained. These things happened.

So, what’s the conclusion then? What happens next? I wish I could tell you there was a big Hollywood ending on this story — that we discovered a cemetery under our house, or that someone who met an untimely end had unfinished business and was trying to communicate with us. I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of an ending to this story.

Would it intrigue you to know we still live in this house? Or that the activity we experienced has never entirely gone away?

In the next chapter, I’ll try to wrap it all up with as much clarity as I can.

In order to find out more about the history of our home, I went down to the Fargo title company and took possession of our abstract, a thick, three hundred page document, worn at the edges and bound at the top with brass fasteners. I sat down at the table and thumbed through it, eager to put names on the families who’d come and gone before us.

Before there was a house on this plot of land in North Fargo, it was owned by a familiar cast of characters. Charlemagne Tower, Northern Pacific, the Hector family. Fargo residents who’ve examined their home’s documents have probably seen one or more of those names — Tower, for whom Tower City, North Dakota is named, was a land broker who dealt in lands originally deeded to the Northern Pacific, and the Hector family were early settlers. The International Airport in Fargo now wears their name.

Deeded by the US Government to the Northern Pacific Railroad by an act of Congress in 1864 and signed by President Benjamin Harrison, “to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast by the Northern Route.”

There were hundreds of pages of this… the Dakota Territory land our home now rests on changed hands several times before any Europeans had even laid eyes on it, but our home’s occupied history begins around 1947.

The property was owned by Even and Clara R. from 1947 to 1950. Although the home we now live in was not yet built, it’s unclear whether there was a structure on this property during that three year span. Then in 1950, they sold the home to John and Betty R. of Fargo. They were the first to occupy the home we now live in, and their mortgage was $9,400.

I took out a sheet of paper and started making notes as I paged through the document until I had a list with dates. This is how the home’s ownership breaks down:

Even and Clara R. — 1947 to 1950

John and Betty R. — 1950 to 1953

Harlan and Gloria W. — 1953 to 1957

Elwin and Bernice F. — 1957 to 1969

Erwin and Rosa F. — 1969 to 1972

Leon and Kathy P. — 1972 to 1976

Peter and Julie O. — 1976 to 1990

Willie and Gayle H. — 1990 to 1995

Warren H. — 1995 to 1997

Troy and Janie R. — 1997 to 2007

The room was dark except for my reading light and my cat was sitting in my lap, as he so often does.

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After I started researching some of the names in the document, I learned a few things about several of the families. Erwin F. was a well-known Fargo baker, and we found a small point-of-purchase display rack in our attic that may have been from his bakery. I also discovered Peter O. was the man who built the addition on our house where our kitchen and dining room are now. My elderly neighbor tells me Peter did the whole job himself, and dug out the foundation with a shovel, by hand — a really big job. Interesting curiosities, but nothing more. I was engrossed in the document and didn’t notice that my cat had jumped down and wandered off.

Another thing that struck me when I looked at the list of names was the rather short duration that most families lived here. Of the ten owners, only three stayed for ten years or longer. Most of our home’s former residents lived here from 2 to 5 years. Perhaps they all moved on rather quickly because the home was small, a common starter home, and they quickly outgrew it. Perhaps there was another reason.

From behind me, the floor creaked. I noticed the cat was no longer in my lap, and since he was a fat cat who frequently made the floor creak, I reflexively looked back, expecting to see a round fur ball approaching to reclaim his place in my lap. Instead, I saw a gray shape the size of an adult, without features, like a silhouette, leaning over my shoulder, as if to see what I was reading. I jumped, skittered the legs of my chair backward and stood up. The shape was gone.

I wouldn’t realize it until later, but that was my first encounter with something else, different from the child-size thing we had been encountering already.

I didn’t do much more research that night, but I eventually found a few interesting things regarding the history of our neighborhood, things that would become much more interesting when a paranormal investigation of our home turned up EVP recordings that sounded like carousel music.